


never the same river twice

by Contra



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, The Iliad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:55:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25894780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Contra/pseuds/Contra
Summary: Helen lives, Andy doesn't die and Troy is just a burning city.(Or, there are many names in history. Some of them are ours.)
Relationships: Andromache of Scythia/Helen of Troy
Comments: 14
Kudos: 76





	never the same river twice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thesearchforbluejello](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesearchforbluejello/gifts).



> Andy/Quynh are endgame obviously, but I have zero idea about Andy's timeline and I wanted an explanation for why that is the name she stuck with, since she seems to be significantly older than Troy.
> 
> Title is from Heraclitus' quote “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man", which I guess applies for women too.
> 
> EDIT: It's even better, according to @thesearchforbluejello, the original quote is ποταμω γαρ ουκ έστιν εμβαιναι δις τω αυτω - I'll just copy in the explanation:
> 
> "Greek verbs have person but not gender, meaning that "embainai," our verb meaning to step, encompasses masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns, so it includes guys, gals, and non-binary pals! There's no distinction! And all "ouk" does here is negate the verb, so although some scholars translate it as "no one steps" that's actually, strictly speaking, wrong! Because it negates the verb, [Charles] Kahn is right that it should be a genderless "one" (for English) "cannot step in the same river twice." (Fun facts: "tō autō" goes with "potamō" to mean "the same river" and "dis" gives us our twice. "Gar" does about as much as Booker does when they're trying to identify Nile during the train scene, meaning that it's there and contributes a little, but not enough to make that much of a difference."
> 
> Summary quote is derived from Richard Siken's Little Beast, but since you're reading gay Old Guard fanfic, I guess you already know.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that history – at least _epics_ history, rather than _footnotes_ history – will remember her as Hector’s wife.

She can’t even picture his face when she closes her eyes.

He had one, she's pretty sure, but she has no idea what he looked like.

She can still see Helen though, Helen whose face launched a thousand ships, Helen who was beautiful, that kind of beauty that will only reveal itself centuries later to have been unmatched in history. Still to this day, she isn’t sure whether Helen was kidnapped or came willingly, whether she loved Paris or whether she just wanted to run away and took whatever chance she had.

All she remembers are her terrified eyes as Troy burned around them. It doesn't matter either way.

Andromache of Scythia is, at that point, over 3000 years old. This, to her, is home (Theben too - and Babylon.)

Helen is young, and princess of Sparta, and she doesn’t die today - Andy does, five times, ten times, with blood on her hands, as Helen tries to herd women and children into safe places hidden deep in the city. Helen must have seen, but she doesn't bring it up.

“This is my fault,” Helen says, and she’s not crying. It takes a lot, Andy knows, half-remembered from some other lifetime, to not cry as your civilization crumbles around you, because of you.

By now Helen has blood on her hands, too, from dressing wounds, from stealing a dagger from some nameless corpse they passed on the street. This is the part of war that nobody sees - or talks about, if they do.

(Andromache of Scythia, who likes this name and predates the Scythians by a few millennia, does not say,

“It’s not.”

Does not say, “It’s mine.”

History is not so much a thread, but a river.)

After eighteen hours of sitting in a cramped cellar, surrounded by corpses, by crying children, by oozing wounds, by filth, nobody looks beautiful. But Helen is alive.

After eighteen hours of fighting, which is not even that much, which might even still be the beginning, no war looks glorious. But Helen is alive.

After eighteen hours, survival breaks down into moments, breaths strung together like pearls on a thread of senselessness. But Helen is-

Not a thread, Andromache reminds herself, the metaphor breaks down here, a river.

There is no particular fixed way this goes, just a general direction.

Somewhere close by, Patroclus dies and Achilles goes mad.

Somewhere even closer by, a woman breaks out into hysterics, screams about the end of times, screams about death – somebody had told her that her son had fallen while defending the city and Andromache knows from a strategic point of view there’s a reason why news like this should wait until after the battle, _shut up shut up,_ other people mouth at her, _you’ll get us all killed_ , but Helen, who is sweaty and dirty and grimy and covered in blood, Helen cradles her like a baby and soothes her and mumbles words and children’s songs in her ear, until the woman who is not a mother anymore, the mother-orphan, breaks down into horrible, soundless sobs.

Epic history – and footnotes.

But they’re alive.

In Andy’s case, that’s not a victory, even though life should be.

Of course, Andy hadn’t known about the Trojan war in advance. It’s not a thread, she’s not _dragged_ towards history, it’s a river and she goes with the current, she’d known there was _something._ Marrying Hector, that was just a ploy to get to the center of it. If you look at it from the ex-post viewpoint of constant immortality, it still could have been something like fate.

She doesn’t cry as she hears the news, they treat her like a widow, even though she _is_. Technically speaking, she’s been a widow for a very long time. She's had men before and names.

They lead her to Hector’s body and it takes her a second to pick him out, among all the others, and parts of her try to muster up sympathy, because he was not, technically speaking, at fault here, but her name means _man-fighter_ and he did marry her. Should have seen it coming, one way or another.

Paris is dead, too, and Helen is sitting there, mute with anger, mute with grief. “I’m sorry,” Andy says, and means it.

She’s 3000 years old, give or take a few centuries, and Paris and Helen, for all that history will remember them, were a stupid teenage love affair, or maybe a stupid teenage kidnapping, or maybe a stupid teenage runaway. They were too young for this, but so is everyone, except perhaps Andy - and _she_ still feels that way too.

In that very moment, Andy doesn’t know that she will still read about the Trojan wars another 3000 years in the future, that there will still be copies of the Iliad, which has not been written yet, even at the end of the world. Here, it’s just Helen by the ruins of the city, Helen, who hasn’t changed out of her blood-stained clothes – Helen: ruins, flesh and blood.

“My mother said-” But Helen breaks off, stares into the distance. There's still fires burning somewhere. Her eyes are red-rimmed and there's an ugly bruise over her cheekbone.

(She could continue, say “– on days like today the rivers are made of tears and blood,” and Andy would understand, the way she always understood, the wine-darkness of the seas and the grief and the poetry and there will be nothing to say to it, because this story is over. Meaning is something that happens after the fact. So she’d say “I’m sorry” again and leave, forwards, forwards into the future.)

But instead Helen, who had a mother – who did not, in fact, hatch from a swan’s egg like the stories will say, who was instead woman-born, came to the world covered in blood, screaming – looks at Andy and asks,

“What is it like to be untouchable?”

Of course Helen saw. Andy died in front of her at least five times, maybe ten, maybe more.

And Andy, by this point, has gotten used to death so much she never even screams anymore.

There is, of course, only one answer that means both _I’m not_ and _let me show you._

They’re both surprised how much they lean into the kiss.

History is not a thread, Andy knows, when she picks up the Iliad, centuries later, leafs through it and finds that it’s almost entirely about a man she never met.

History is and forever remains a river.

Women tend to drown in it.

“Wait, were you _there?”_ Nile will say, stumbling through the door, laughing with Yusuf about something, when she notices the book in Andy’s hand, she’s still giddy-drunk on the thrill of immortality.

Andy will smile, say _not this story,_ and Nile will not understand it, not yet.

Even later, she will ask about Andy’s name ( _man-fighter_ ) (that sounds _awesome!_ ) and why, among all the names she had in history, that’s the one she stuck with, and what was Troy like, what was history like, was it actually _real_?

And Andy will not answer, because Helen is so long dead, because the last thing alive of her will die with Andy, and the last thing of the Scythians will die with Andy too, and the last thing of one nondescript summer morning in Babylon where she got drunk and wanted to kill herself and couldn’t, because fate made her defend that city.

Instead she’ll say “Nile,-”

(your name, it means life)

(I think I stole your death, I’m sorry)

“History is a river. And people like us, we're the rain.”


End file.
